Harvest Time

Fate is the accumulation of unaccounted-for consequences — but unaccounted-for is not the same as unwilled. Fate itself is mostly an act of will, granting that our will is not only, or even especially, what we say we desire. We all live most of our lives on the level of what we say of ourselves — that is, of what we wish others to see of us. We usually live so consistently in the manner of that which we wish to seem, that we ourselves forget most of what we truly were when we made our choices, and most of what we actually intended. And if we tried to retrace our steps after the fact and say what we truly were and actually intended at that time — we would inevitably falsify our wills again, creating yet another image of ourselves as we wished to be seen by others, even if this time the image were that of “one who sees himself truly.”

Fate is our descriptive category for the ultimate results of all those acts of will we (inevitably, sincerely) falsified in speech for others — including the falsification that our falsifying speech was only intended for others. Fate is the clever trick, happy or tragic, that we all play on ourselves. In other words, as in the ancient adage, we reap what we sow — except that we rarely see exactly what we have sown until harvest time, at which point we suddenly catch a glimpse, as from our deepest memory, of which seeds we were really holding in our hands that day.